


The Never-Ending Nightmare

by SonjaJade



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Attempted Murder, Flashbacks, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-War, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-24
Updated: 2017-03-24
Packaged: 2018-10-10 02:11:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10426863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SonjaJade/pseuds/SonjaJade
Summary: Dr. Knox has done some of the most atrocious things that could ever be done to another human being.  But after being discharged from Ishval, can he live with the things he’s done?





	

**Author's Note:**

> I did some research on the Nazi medical experiments conducted at Auschwitz by Josef Mengele. The stories I heard in the documentaries, the accounts I read… There is not a level of hell deep enough for that man’s soul to burn in. After discovering the things he did, and assuming Knox worked under a commander as cruel as Mengele- I only wonder how Knox didn’t blow his own head off after the war. I would have. Credit to binaryalchemist for dubbing him “Owen”. Thanks to bay115 for the much needed beta!!
> 
> Tumblr FMA Week Day 1: Damaged

He knew as soon as he stepped off the train that he was fucked.  The sight of his wife and son smiling and racing toward him made him sick.  
  
 _‘Don’t run to me,’_ he thought to himself as he nearly turned away from them.  _‘I can’t… I can’t…’_  
  
He wife kissed his cheek and his twelve year old son wrapped his arms around his chest.  Owen began to weep, right there on the platform, one arm around Henry’s shoulder’s and the other around Cora’s.  
  
“Honey, welcome home!” Cora cried, her mascara blackening her beautiful eyes.  
  
 _‘No!  You shouldn’t welcome home a monster!’_ he wanted to shout at her.  Instead, his knees buckled and two servicemen who were also disembarking stopped to help carry him to a bench.  
  
“Are you alright, Dr. Knox?” the taller one asked.  “Should we call- well, should we call a doctor?”  
  
He felt a pat on his shoulder and recognized the sound of the chuckle behind him and his sobs stopped immediately.  
  
“Feeling a little overwhelmed at your reunion, Owen?”  
  
He turned to look over his shoulder at a sallow faced man with glasses and a gleaming gold front tooth.  His cockeyed stare seemed to say a million things at once and he was tempted to throttle him with his bare hands right then and there.  
  
“Y-yeah,” he sniffled.  “That’s a-all.”  
  
That wasn’t it, though.  Not in the least.  He was a monster, ordered by Satan himself to be one.  But the thing was, the devil didn’t have horns.  He had a receding hair line, a round face and a perfect gold cuspid.  
  
“Some rest and a good home cooked meal should help with that.  Take care, now.”  And he walked off into the crowd, leaving the two soldiers and small family behind.  
  
“Are you sure you’re alright, doctor?” the young soldier asked.  
  
Owen took a deep breath, trying to force the images of mutilated children from his mind.  “Yeah.  I’m alright, son- go on home.”  The two young men wished him well, said goodbye to his family, and then raced off to join their own loved ones.  
  
Cora gave him a worried look.  “Honey?  You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”  
  
No.  He hadn’t seen the ghosts yet.  But he’d helped many a living person become a ghost.  He’d injected countless poisons and chemicals into living people, just to observe the results.  He’d amputated fingers, arms, and legs without anesthesia, to study and come up with better ways to do wartime field amputations.  One poor man was nothing but a torso and a head by the time he was finished, and then he’d been injected with some kind of vaccine thought to prevent gangrene, but instead it exacerbated it and he died within hours.  
  
The worst were the experiments on the children.  Kids younger than Henry wound up on his table, with orders to find out if their red eyes could be permanently dyed a different color, to see if burning their hair off at the scalp would cause it to grow back black instead of white, to see if dunking them repeatedly in icy water would lighten their tanned, brown skins…  
  
“I need a drink,” he said out loud.  He looked into Cora’s eyes, beseeching her silently to rid him of the memories somehow.  But he only saw confusion and worry on her face and he felt even more guilty.  He slipped a fake smile onto his face, mostly for his family’s sake.  “Yes, a drink and I bet I’ll perk right up.”  
  
That night, after he struggled to get through dinner, he was trying to relax in the bathtub.  The tub had the unfortunate resemblance to the ones in Ishval, the ones they used for the ice baths.  No matter how hot he made the water, he couldn’t seem to get warm…  
  
He spied his wife’s shaving razor in a cup on the edge and he grabbed it.  Carefully, he pulled the blade from it and turned it in the light.  
  
One cut.  That would be all he’d need.  Just under the right ear.  The carotid artery would bleed out faster than the jugular, and by the time anyone noticed, he’d be long gone and free.  And then Cora and Henry could be free.  He’d heard stories about guys who came back from the war, only to off themselves.  He never thought it would happen to him… but as he turned that razor blade in his fingers, he thought he might understand now why they’d done it.  
  
The door opened and Cora smiled at him.  “Oh, did the blade fall out of my razor?” She hurried to pluck it from his fingers.  “That thing never keeps the blades in very well, I’m so sorry dear!”  She sat some fresh towels on the corner of the sink and asked, “It didn’t hurt you, did it?”  
  
He could feel tears burning his eyes and she knelt down beside the tub.  “Honey, what’s wrong?”  Her hand reached into the water to grab his and she hissed as she pulled it back quickly.  “Owen, you’re boiling alive in there!” she said as she jerked the chain on the plug.  “Why’s the water so hot?”  
  
“It was awful, Cora,” he answered as the water rolled away from his body.  “No horror movie could ever compare to the things I saw- _to the things I did_.”  Tears fells from his eyes helplessly.  He met her concerned gaze and said, “I’m so sorry.”  
  
She gathered him up in her arms and for the briefest of moments, he felt like maybe she could cure him.  The warmth in her embrace, the soothing calm in her voice…  She helped him to stand and wrapped him in his bathrobe, then led him to bed where she cradled him against her body.  
  
She promised that anything he’d done could be repented for.  “You’ve got to have faith, Owen.  You’ve got to confess your sins to God and do everything you can to make up for them.”  
  
“How do you repent for torture?” he sobbed into her nightgown.  “How do you repent from _murder_?!”  
  
When she didn’t have an answer for him, he resolved it in his head.  He would kill himself as soon as she went to sleep.  
  
But the problem was, she didn’t go to sleep.  In fact, she held him and kissed his forehead until _he_ dropped off in her arms.  
  
His dreams were even more awful than the blood-soaked reality he’d just returned from.  The Ishvalans he’d put to death with his experiments were all piled in one room with him, as another lay on the table.  He looked down at his feet and saw his son, dismembered, disemboweled, bleeding out and gasping for help.  His wife now lay on the table, her face twisted with fear and agony, her ribcage cut open and her still beating heart run through with about a dozen or more electrodes.  
  
“Make it stop!” she screamed.  “Please, Owen!  Save me!  Save Henry!”  Blood bubbled out of her mouth as she wailed, and then the sound of that infamous gold toothed bastard who demanded all those experiments was laughing behind him.  
  
“You’ve only got time to save one!” he said cheerfully.  “If you save your wife, you can make another child.  But if you save your son you can guarantee your family line will continue.”  
  
“No!” one of the Ishvalan dead cried.  “Save me!  I’m a doctor!  Save me and we can save them both!”  
  
An Ishvalan woman gasped, “Save me!  I will bear you more children!”  
  
The dead were awakening, each begging for their right to be saved while his family continued to slip away from him, heartbeat by heartbeat.  His commanding surgeon tapped him on the shoulder and gave him that dreadful cock-eyed smile.  
  
“Time is running out.  You’re going to lose both of them, and then how will you be able to study my hard work on their bodies?”  
  
“ ** _YOU SON OF A BITCH!_** ” he roared, his hands coming around the cruel man’s throat and crushing his neck with all the strength he had.  “You had no right to do this!  You had no right to make _me_ do this!  All these innocent people!  And for what!?”  He throttled the man, shaking him violently as he forced him to the floor, his voice nothing but a desperate gurgle as he pleaded for mercy.  
  
From far away, he heard his boy screaming for him to _stop_.  And then there was a sharp whack to the back of his head.  The dream began to fade.  Reality began to overcome the vision of the gold-toothed freak dying at his own hands…  
  
And in his place was Cora, turning pale and her eyes rolling backward in her head, his son beating him about the head and shoulders with a brass bedside lamp.  
  
He immediately released her and scurried backward, jabbing his ass on the corner of the nightstand before coming to a stop in front of his chest of drawers.  Henry caught his mother before she fell off the bed and began to give her mouth to mouth.  One hand pinched her nose while the other clutched the brass lamp tightly, ready to strike at his father if came any closer.  
  
Owen buried his face in his hands and began to weep.  “My god, what’s happening!”  
  
As soon as Cora was able to speak, she hoarsely told him to stop crying.  He looked over at her with wary eyes.  
  
“Call Dr. Flannigan,” she growled.  
  
His colleague.  His _friend_.  A psychological therapist that specialized in repairing the damage done in violent police work- finding murder victims and the like.  He nodded and scrambled for the phone.  He heard thumping from his bedroom, but he forced himself to call Flannigan and ignore it.  
  
He was told to come right away.  When he asked about what to do about what he’d done to Cora, his friend asked, “Is she alright?”  
  
“I don’t know!” Owen panicked.  “She was able to talk-”  
  
“Then she’ll live.  If you want to make sure she _continues_ to live, get your ass over here and plan on staying a few weeks.”  
  
He agreed, hung up and called out to his family, telling them he was coming back to the bedroom, that he was going to be going away for a little while.  But when he got there, no one was there.  Henry and Cora were gone, her dresser drawers open and empty, her vanity cleaned off…  Her wedding ring gleamed on the top of his chest of drawers and he picked it up.  Underneath that was a letter, scrawled hurriedly on the back of the electric bill.  
  
It said the devil wanted him to give up, to kill himself and not endure the pain of making amends for his actions.  It said she believed he could overcome his demons and things could be right again.  She said she loved him, always, and that when he was better, she and Henry would come home.  
  
While he didn’t particularly share her faith in God, he knew offing himself would certainly be the easy way out.  He slipped her wedding ring into her jewelry box and packed a bag for himself.  He would get better.  He would spend the rest of his life apologizing to his wife and son for all he’d done to them in the short two days he’d been home, and he’d beg their forgiveness.  
  
One autumn night some seven years later, a young man in a steel suit of armor would remind him how precious family was, even damaged ones.  And the next time he saw his wife and son, he made them a promise that he was doing everything he could to be a better man, a well man.  And piece by piece, they came back together.


End file.
